A Tale of Love and Darkness

I HAD NEVER seen a house like it in my life before that morning.

It was surrounded by a thick stone wall that concealed an orchard shady with vines and fruit trees. My astonished eyes looked instinctively for the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. There was a well in front of the house set in a wide terrace paved with blocks of smooth pinkish stone with delicate pale-blue veins. An arbor of thick vines shaded a corner of this terrace. Some stone seats and a low, wide stone table tempted you to linger in this arbor, to take your ease, to rest in the shade of the vines and listen to the buzzing of the summer bees, the singing of the birds in the orchard, and the trickle of the fountain-because at one end of the arbor there was a little pool in the form of a five-pointed star made of stone and lined with blue tiles decorated with Arabic writing. In the middle of the pool a fountain bubbled quietly. Groups of goldfish swam slowly to and fro among the clumps of water lilies.